My Data & BI Summit Recap

I finally came around to writing a wrap-up for the Data & BI Summit in Dublin last month.
No fancy pictures or colors, just a to-the-point summary.

New features

• Incremental refresh – Premium (included in May update as preview feature)
• Drillthrough with current filters and parameters (included in May update)
• Common Data Service For Analytics (preview live)
• Theme file additions coming soon:
• Theme export
• Background added to themes
• Table/matrix headers
• Persistent filters (per user) in the service
• Buttons to trigger action (included in May update)
• Q&A and linguistics
• App workspaces without Office365 group

Modelling

• Optimize your model (size)
• Make use of Query folding in Power Query
• Applies to Import mode only
• Filter first, Transform later
• Use supported transformations first, non-folding steps at the end
• Writing a SQL query in Get Data prevents folding
• Create a blank query with #shared to show a document library of all M functions (Blog)

Visualization

• Choose a theme
• Report theme generator at PowerBI.tips
• Color Theme Creator at Aka.ms/pbitheme
• Outlining
• Canva.com
• PowerPoint
• PowerBI.tips
• Storytelling, with:
• Custom visuals (e.g. Timeline Storyteller)
• Bookmarks
• Tooltip pages
• PowerApps visual
• Drillthrough
• Syncing slicers

Governance

• Use App Workspaces for DTAP
• DEV_Finance
• UAT_Finance
• Finance
• Use Onedrive for Business for versioning your pbix-files, with the same folders as the App Workspace
• Use the API’s with PowerShell to copy resources between workspaces
• Chriss Webb (@cwebb_bi) wrote a successful script in response to a video from Adam Saxton (@GuyInACube)

Best practices and notes

Visualization | Model

• Driving table for measures
• Hide unused columns
• Totals in matrix and tables insensitive to row filters
• Uniform naming of measures and calculations
• Sync slicers
• Add descriptions where possible
• Make sure filters are not hardcoded

Governance

• Add an about page with last refresh date time and description of Model
• Version the Model
• Schedule datasets using Admin account for one place to monitor failure notification emails
• Use one drive as source control
• Golden dataset

Further reading

• Power BI Whitepapers
• PowerBI.tips
• Power BI User Voice

@NickyvV

Data & BI Summit

I have quite some good news: in April I’m going to the Data & BI Summit in Dublin, Ireland.
The Data & BI Summit is hosted by The Power BI User Group.
With tracks like Visualise, Model, Govern and Develop there’s content for a wide range of people, from Business analysts to IT admins.

I’m particularly interested in the Microsoft Power Series where members of the so-called “Power BI dream team” will give 2,5 hour long deep dive sessions on topics like Security, Story Telling and Advanced Data Visualisation with Power BI.
What can we expect at the summit? From the website:

• Exceptional, quality content: Learn how to bring your company through the digital transformation by gaining new understandings of your data and deepening your knowledge of the Microsoft Business Intelligence tools. Products will include: Power BI, PowerApps, Flow, SQL Server, Excel, Azure, D365 and more! 
• Answers to your questions: Network with the Microsoft Power BI team, dig-in onsite to find immediate answers with industry experts, Data MVPs, and User Group Leaders while taking advantage of the opportunity to engage in interactive sessions, workshops and labs.
• Network with your peers: Enjoy countless opportunities to create lasting relationships by connecting and networking with user group peers, partners and Microsoft team members.
• Stretch your skill set: Advance your career by learning the latest updates and how they can help you and your business.

If you’re also going, let me know in the comments or on Twitter, I hope to see you there!

@NickyvV

Dynamics 365 Tech Conference Here I Come

Conference booked: check!
Conference scheduled build: check!
Hotel booked: check!
Bags packed: check!
Flight checked-in: check!
Devices charged: check!
Power converter: check!
Excited? Check!

Really excited?! Check check!

I’m all set! Just trying to get some sleep tonight would be great. My flight goes at 10 AM, but my colleagues pick me up around 5 AM(!), so it’s going to be a short night! We’ll be arriving tomorrow around noon (local time) in Seattle so it’s gonna be a long day tomorrow.

I wish everyone that’s also going a very good conference, make the most out of it for yourself!
If you like, you can reach me on Twitter @NickyvV and we can grab a cup of coffee somewhere.

The Dynamics 365 Tech Conference 2017

I was very excited when I received an e-mail from my employer a few weeks ago which stated I am one of the 5 people that have the chance to go to the Dynamics 365 Tech Conference 2017! I immediately checked my agenda and I would be home just in time for my wife’s birthday, so that’s a go! The location will be the same as last year: Seattle. The conference will be held from March 12-15 and I will be going with 4 other colleagues from Pulse and 3 from AXtension.


There will be a business consultant, two functional consultants and a developer joining me, so we’ll make up a nice mixed group. We will have a short tuning session before we leave to make sure we aren’t all in the same rooms together to make the most of the sessions.
I am particularly interested in the Reporting and Analytics track about different reporting tools and Power BI, but also in the Entity Store, Continuous Delivery and the Common Data Model (or Common Data Service) in general.


In the next months I hope I find the time to blog some more about the upcoming conference, I will definitely record my findings during and after the conference!

The flights have been booked and the ESTA application process has been completed. I just hope there will not be any more restrictions like the recent ones the @POTUS declared. We will arrive on the Saturday prior to the event so we’ll have a little spare time left to discover Seattle. I heard the Boeing Museum and the Space Needle are good for a visit. If you have any other recommendations please let me know.
If you’re also going, do let me know in the comments or on Twitter (@NickyvV), I hope to see you there!

Suggested reading

I came across some nice articles and blog posts in the last weeks I wanted to share:

• How to communicate effectively in business by @SQLRockstar 
• PowerPivot vs Power View: Whats The Difference? by @PowerPivotPro
• The Index Your Queries will Never Request (A Clustered Index!) by @kendra_little
• The BI Survey 13 is now open, you can take it here

Hopefully you can get somehting useful out of the links!

You can also follow me on Twitter: @NickyvV

MSTechEd Europe 2012 Day 3: BI and Data Visualization

I finally had some time to work out some of the stuff from the MSTeched Europe from last week.
I have a few other sessions I'd like to share and see also on Channel 9, so you'll see some more posts coming soon hopefully!

This session given by Jen Stirrup was about BI and data visualizations, mostly about PowerPivot (download) and Power View.

The session starts out with a more theoretic (Jen's) view of Business Intelligence and how visualizations determine the first impression of humans.

The comparison is made between Traditional BI vs New End User BI, where BI is about people first and the technology is an enabler. Business users have to embrace the BI solutions being build, otherwise there's no feeling with the system build and it will not be adopted within the business.
Traditional BI is difficult for IT and also takes a long time to build where End User BI is more flexible and mashups are possible.

This is a spreadsheet to manage my spreadsheets!

Starting with a quick look at PowerPivot: it gives users the power to create compelling self-service BI solutions using a familiar Excel Interface. It can be used for mashups, has a high performance due to the xVelocity in memory analytics engine (a.k.a. VertiPaq) and has sophisticated Time Intelligence functions.

Business puzzles vs Business mysteries
Excel (PowerPivot) is used  for business puzzles: the business has a very well defined question and a well defined answer. Compared to Power View: we have an ill defined business question and an ill defined answer which make up the business mysteries.

The prerequisites for Power View are
- SQL Server 2012
- SharePoint (Enterprise) 2010 SP1
There is supposed to be no typing in Power View (except for the name of the charts), so it's all about dragging, dropping, slicing and brushing and filtering data.

Data visualization is about people:
- preattentive processing: we see lines and colors, in 2D
- visual integration: we see faces
- cognitive integration: use context and world knowledge and look back top-down
People tend to look at the top right corner of a page or chart first.
The Line, Bar and Scatter chart are best used when we take into account the above theories. This is why Jen doesn't really like Pie charts because they use area and angles, both are not well read.

Andy Caddy pointed out the following pie chart to Jen last week!

Something that also stood by me was the comparison made with Kylie Minoque when looking at pie charts. In "Can't get you out of my head" she nodges here head to left and right, that's what people tend to do when looking at pie charts when the slice is not starting at 12 o'clock in the pie chart.

Power View has the possibility to export your page to PowerPoint and interact with that page inside the presentation. An instance of Power View is loaded, therefore a connection to SharePoint is also needed, and you can slice and dice in the same way as in Power View.

I also had the honour to speak to her in person after her session. Nice meeting you Jen!

You can watch the full session at Channel 9 here.